#how fucking BANAL to even treat suffering like that
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some of y’all think suffering is a competition and it shows
#this is literally just me thinking abt the post I just reblogged#bc the implicit message of replying to something like what they described#which if u missed the post was like#‘today me and my mom-‘ ‘wow what’s it like to have good parents my mom could never’#that kind of stuff?#the implicit message is wow I am suffering and you have it SO good#it’s an ‘I have it worse than you woe is me’#how silly! how stupid! to rank yourself and others off of a singular experience! a singular factor!#how fucking BANAL to even treat suffering like that#or to treat JOY like that#you dont reward people for suffering and you don’t punish people for joy#and that’s an imperative I’m telling y’all not to do that and not to think like that#I LOVE hearing abt my friends good family stuff#even though mine is complicated as fuck#it’s cute! it’s nice! it makes me happy that they have that!#I’m living vicariously tbh!!#learn to live vicariously through your friends happiness#instead of punishing them for not suffering in the exact ways you have suffered
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Yellowjackets 2.02 Thoughts:
Shauna talking to Jackie’s dead ghost is so fucking haunting. The utter banality of the talk, and yet, at the same time, Jackie always urging Shauna towards some sort of precipice, whether it’s confessing the “truth” or acknowledging that she’s the one holding the knife. No one’s doing homoerotic fucked up besties like them. 😭
Tai and Lottie both caring for Shauna makes me tender.
God, I really appreciate Callie’s character. Her parents are really messing her up, and yet, even as she’s cognizant of this, one of the things she seems to be hurt by most is the fact that neither of them have registered that she’s gone. She talks about using the vape to numb herself into oblivion. And that’s exactly how Shauna feels every single day.
TAISSA POUNDING ESPRESSO AFTER ESPRESSO. REFUSING TO SLEEP. HER REFLECTION MOVING. MA’AM, SEEK HELP.
The fucking no-eyed man. I can deal with the extensive gore. I can handle the cannibalism. But THIS GUY. Every time he comes on my screen, I McFreakin’ lose it. What is his DEAL?
Also, why tf is this show so darkly lit? Showtime, do better.
Sophie Thatcher perfectly replicating Juliette’s cadence is always so incredible to me!!!!! Of the casting pairs, I’ve always thought they look the least alike appearance wise, but goddamn, Sophie nails the mannerisms.
“We are an intentional community turning suffering into strength.” Lmao, Lottie. Also, adult Lottie is so, so pretty.
“It’s heliotrope, it’s not purple.” AKQKWKDJWJS.
Lottie treating Lisa like an underpaid intern about the drink, lmfao. Loving adult Lottie’s vibes so far. Her entire enlightened act is so performative, but simmering underneath, is that same uneasy energy that the rest of our core four has. To take the analogy further, she’s seemed to take the Tai and Shauna route of trying to repress what happened in the woods and pretend like everything’s fine. She’s fine. Of course she’s paired with Nat, the perpetual realist here.
Shauna trying to reach out to Callie and being rebuffed at every attempt. It’s not necessarily that it’s too little, too late, and more that she’s ignoring the elephant of a body in the room, trying to move past it, like she always does. Hhhhhghhh.
Misty’s screensaver being a stock photo of ultra cute kittens is perfect. ANQKWOQWODJ, MISTY ANGRILY REPLYING ON “REDDIT” AND THEN REALIZING SHE MADE A TYPO. WKQKWKSJDJAJ.
THE MAKEUP ON JACKIE. GODDAMN.
Tai confronting Shauna is so fucking painful. Sophie Nélisse utterly shutting down. Lottie defending her. I’m so unwell. They both care for her so much, and there’s also this added element of Taissa trying to run from her own demons by making Shauna confront her own.
Taissa and Shauna’s relationship genuinely might be my favorite on this show in both timelines. Like, it is so complicated and raw and brutal and simultaneously so loving. Hhhggsghhhshhh.
Kevyn showing up. Oh, God. Oh, God. And Shauna fuckin’ lying. LISTEN, I objectively know they’re not going to stick Melanie Lynskey in jail (at least for long), but still, I can’t wait for this storyline to be resolved.
KEVYN CATCHING HER IN THE LIE. GODDAMN. BABY GIRL, MISTY MADE YOU A COOKIE TELLING YOU EXACTLY WHAT TO SAY.
AND SHE’S STILL LYING. GIRLFRIEND,THEY CAN SUPBOENA YOUR TEXTS OR SOMETJING.
Callie stepping in to help her mom. I’m actually so tender about their effed up relationship, it’s unreal.
“So you lied to be feminist?” KQQKKWEKDJDJEJEJNSWHAJS.
“At least go through the back in case he’s still out there.” I’m unwell.
Sammy showing up. Hhhhgh. As upsetting as it is that Simone is being so cautious and cold towards Taissa, it is so warranted after finding your beloved family dog beheaded in the basement as part of some fucked up sacrificial altar.
Elijah Wood!!!!!!!!!! AKWKDNNSS. THE KNEE HIGH SOCKS WITH THE SHORTS.
NAT FAKING JAVI’S DEATH, OH, MY FUCKING GOD. CUTTING HERSELF TO FAKE BLOOD. THIS SHOW.
Poor Travis. Oh, my God.
Adult Travis!! The fact that he calls Lottie as well… Simone Kessell is doing such a wonderful job with Lottie; her rage and fear in the Travis flashbacks are compelling.
GOD. TRAVIS INITIATING THIS RITUAL. Whether we can trust that Lottie’s telling the truth, that remains to be seen, but I do think the fact that they’re accompanying the story with a bonafide flashback makes me think that they want us to take it at least some of it at face value.
THE ZOMBIE FUCKING LAURA LEE HALLUCINATION. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. The tenderness in her eyes before LL stepped out of the shadows, though. Lottie/Laura Lee truthers rise up.
Also, adult Lottie/Nat have very good chemistry.
THERE BEING A CHAIN ON TAISSA’S GODDAMN DOOR. DID SHE HALLUCINATE HER SON? UM.
WHERE THE FUCK ARE SAMMY AND STEVE, TAI? 😭
Oh, God. The debate about Jackie’s clothes. So brutal. Like the earlier cabin scenes in this ep. showed, the tensions between the girls are reaching a fever pitch.
Lottie seeing the cut on Jackie’s arm, but not being judgmental about it. Giving her the necklace. 😭😭
Callie, don’t flirt with that grown ass man. Nooooooo.
Callie lying and saying she’s a student at Rutgers, the same school Jackie and Shauna were supposed to go to. ;-;
Shauna going to light the pyre when Nat was confronting Lottie. Hhhhgh.
“I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE YOU END AND I BEGIN.” NOT A BLURRED MARGINS LINE. FUCK ME UP.
Travis adding Javi’s pants to the fire. 😭 Lottie and Tai being the ones who escort Shauna away. Hhhhhshhhhhhgh.
I’m so excited to see the other adults interact with Lottie.
Nat having a clearly traumatic flashback when she lays down…
AWNDNSNSN, THE BLACKLIGHT NOTE.
THE DUDE CALLIE WAS FLIRTINT WITH BEING A DETECTIVE. JESUS.
Kevyn being soft on Shauna. ;w; I really do like him, and I’m glad they brought him back.
Not Travisnat having sex on the eve when he just found out his brother is dead. NOT HIM ENVISIONING LOTTIE. WOOF.
THE TWISTING AERIAL PERSPECTIVE. SNOW FALLING ON TOP OF JACKIE’S PYRE. OH, MY GOD. IT’S???????? IT’S SMOKING HER. IT’S FUCKING COOKING HER FOR REAL.
TAI HALLUCINATED SAMMY. OH, MY GOD.
“You are… very sick, Taissa.” I’m so sad.
“BAD ONE” TAISSA NOT LOOKING AT THE ROAD, GLARING AT SIMONE. A FUCKING WRECK. SHIT. SIMONE, PULL THROUGH QUEEN. SOMEONE HAS TO BE NORMAL FOR SAMMY.
OH, GOD. THAT FIRST SHOT OF JACKIE’S BODY IS SO FUCKED UP.
THEY ARE ALL GONNA FUCKIN’ EAT HER.
SHE WANTS US TO.
THE GREEK MYTHOLOGY FEAST. IT’S A SACRED COMMUNION. IT’S BACCHANALIA. IT’S STARVING CHILDREN EATING THEIR TEAM CAPTAIN AND FRIEND IN THE WOODS.
POOR COACH BEN. HELP AOQMWNDNJWJWJSJSJS.
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A night not to forget (in a bad sense) - 1
Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw x leitor;
Synopsis: Rooster comes home to find his wife and son arguing. Things go too far and he needs to step in;
Warnings: violence, name-calling, family problems, panic attack, drugs;
Genre: anguish;
Part 1 - Part 2
This is my first attempt at imagine here on Tumblr, I hope I can keep writing. And english is not my native language, so I hope you guys understand if there is any mistake. (I accept criticism and tips).
Bradley expected to come home to the two of you like any other quiet day. Normally you would be finishing up dinner, or perhaps reading a book while ordering at a restaurant. His son Elijah, who had just turned 16 a few months ago, would be playing a video game in the living room that he begged his dad to buy for his birthday. But, oh! How wrong he was…
You were in a heated argument. At first, he couldn't understand the subject of the fight because their voices were muffled, but as he closed the front door and moved his feet further into the house, the voices in the kitchen grew louder.
In that short amount of time, he had already imagined countless reasons for the screaming. Elijah wouldn't have done the dishes you asked for, tidied up his room, or maybe even, that he could have gone out now for the night without your permission, considering he's done it before, and you were always irritated with worry. As he grew up, more rebellious he became. He wanted to be treated like an adult. But something was extremely wrong, as the discussion seemed too serious for problems as "banal" as these.
Once he placed his backpack on the sofa, he walked to the kitchen entrance and arrived just in time to see Elijah take one of the knives from the holder where it was kept, and point it in your direction. Bradley froze for a few seconds, you two still hadn't noticed his presence. The shock was instantaneous, and as quickly as it came, it was gone. Bradley felt dread, then anger. He felt confused for not understanding the situation. He was nervous. Seeing the boy threaten you with that thing in his hand pissed him off.
He looked into his son's eyes. Elijah seemed to be angry, but it was different, there was a built-in hatred. And when Bradley realized who that hate was directed at, a bitter taste rose in his mouth. It was you. He didn't have time to analyze your state at that moment, he needed to act fast. Bradley ran to his son grabbing his wrists and shoving him until he hit the kitchen island behind them. The boy's lower back suffered an intense impact, hitting the surface of the thing, making him grunt in pain and surprise.
The boy dropped the knife to the floor the minute he was pushed. He was startled as soon as he saw his father's fierce gaze.
"What the hell do you think you're doing pointing that out to your mother?"
"Bradley, calm down"
He looked in her direction in disbelief. Calm? Did you want him to be calm? He just couldn't stomach it.
"He shows you a knife and you wants me to calm down?" he faced Elijah "What the hell were you going to do later, eh? Stick it in her? Were you going to take that fucking knife and go after your own mother, brat?"
"Please, I know he's wrong, but let the boy go and let's settle this."
"Are we going to settle this?! Do you want to know how am I going to solve this? I'm going to cover his face with punchs." now it was Bradley who was losing his mind.
“You will tell me now, loud and clear, why you did this, Elijah.” he asked in a deep, menacing voice.
The boy dropped a few tears in front of his father as he stared back at him. He couldn't stand it for long and ducked his head to look away from his father. Bradley made sure to grab his chin and force him to look up; in him eyes.
“Don't take your eyes off me again." he warned while squeezing the boy's chin tightly "have you decided to become a softie now that I got home, you coward? You looked pretty brave before."
In the background it was possible to hear your strong cry and the sobs coming from your throat. You were in a panic. Although you were grateful that Bradley had come home and prevented your son from committing a greater tragedy, you knew that he could be the reason for another gravity by the way he was acting. He looked like it was about to kill your someone.
“And don't you dare defend him. For years I watched you pat his head, no matter the situation. Raising this spoiled little boy, who now repays you by doing this." he hurt you with those words, leaving your heart tighter and making you think that maybe it was your fault "I won't let you do that again now." he finished.
Elijah was never a bad boy. He is kind and tries hard like any good son, no matter what he does. But all that effort got the better of him, left him exhausted. You were a mother who spoiled a lot, that was true, but only because you thought he deserved it. It wasn't fair to see him killing himself studying at school, to see him succumbing to exhaustion every day to get a scholarship to the college he wanted so much. You didn't demand much from him at home, which left him a little unused to doing housework, but he made up for it in his studies. He is a very smart boy for his age.
You thought everything was fine, but six months ago you found out he was doing drugs. You knew why he had done it, it was so obvious. Sleepless nights, time divided between projects, school and science groups. Although you always told him that he didn't have to live like this, that he could rest, he wouldn't listen to you. He had always been a little greedy, wanting to be the best at everything, to make his father the proudest man in the world. Until he concluded by himself that the only thing that would make his father proud was to pursue a career in the military, something he never wanted. So he got frustrated with that. When he couldn't stand any longer, he resorted to those poisons. Drugs. Bradley din't know nothing about that.
"I'm sorry" Elias started crying hard, it was agonizing "I'm sorry, I don't know what I was thinking."
Bradley loosened her grip on his hands a little, enough for him to be able to move them again. Elijah brought them to his hair, squeezing the strands to the side and closing his eyes hard to cry. The boy let out a terrifying scream and began to scream in grief and self-loathing.
"I'm sorry, Mom. I didn't mean to do this, I swear. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..."
The boy kept repeating the last words. He was looking at you desperately, thinking his mother and father hated him now.
You wanted so badly to go to him. Hug him and tell him you forgave him, that you still loved him dearly and always would. But you hesitated thinking that maybe Bradley would stop your actions. What he had said kept repeating itself in your mind: you always put your hand on his head, I won't let you do that now.
Deep down, you knew he wasn't wrong. He was trying to discipline his son, you also wanted Elijah to know that his actions have consequences, but that was too much. Bradley didn't know about him drug problem, because again, you protected Elijah. Yes, Bradley was absolutely right, you spoiled him too much. You hid from him that what your son was going through, you didn't have that right.
“Elijah, tell your father. He will understand, dear"
"Tell me what?"
Elijah squeezed his eyes shut trying to stop the crying and nervousness.
"I-I…" he swallowed the saliva in his mouth and rubbed his hand over his eyes to wipe away the tears. His breathing began to become irregular, worrying his mother and father.
"Elijah, my love, breathe" you hugged him and started stroking his hair, you didn't even remember the knife anymore, the only thing you wanted was to see your precious son well "calm down, my son."
"What is happening with him?" Bradley asked deeply scared, but you didn't make an effort to answer him, because you were concentrating on the boy feeling sick in front of you. But your attempts at comfort weren't working, it seemed like Elijah wasn't listening to you.
"Elijah, son. Please breathe, I won't do anything with you. Breathe!" Bradley said in an attempt to make him calm down, he turned pale with fear at his son's plight.
“Bradley!" he immediately widened his eyes with your anguished scream "call emergency, now!"
E não demorou, em um instante já estava pegando o celular e discando o número enquanto o filho sufocava.
#bradley bradshaw x y/n#bradley rooster x reader#bradley bradshaw imagine#bradley bradshaw fanfiction#bradley bradshaw x reader#bradley bradshaw fic#bradley bradshaw angst#bradley bradshaw x female reader#top gun movie#top gun fanfiction#bradley rooster bradshaw#rooster bradshaw fic#rooster top gun#rooster bradshaw#top gun rooster#top gun maverick#imagine#x reader#mother reader
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(CW conversion therapy)
What frustrates me about media representations of conversion therapy is that it rarely captures how mundane it is. They often play up the hypocrisy or the abusiveness for drama or laughs (which is 1000% valid I’m not knocking the classics), but I have yet to see something that treats it like an everyday part of the character’s life. The queer character is nearly always sent off to a camp to be fixed where sadistic and repressed counselors run them through every stereotype in the book. And I get that educating people about how fucked up this is is important, because it’s still legal in many places and a lot of people still don’t think it’s that big a deal, but escaping is often framed as this heroic, I’m-free-now-and-proud-and-everything’s-fine romanticized notion of what surviving conversion therapy is. These stories of overcoming are important but they aren’t mine. Conversion therapy is also increasingly portrayed as an anachronism, as something that’s over, something no one seriously believes or does any more, something that makes any story a period piece of a less tolerant time.
I didn’t have to go to a camp or a hospital, the conversion therapy came to me, to my everyday world. It wasn’t this like emergency that required tearful pleas and strict punishment, it was just “my struggle”. My dad subscribed me to LIFE (Living in Freedom Eternally), and every month they would send me newsletters about ex-gays who overcame their sinful attractions and live normal healthy lives (according to a cishet worldview). I had weekly meetings with my Pastors to check on my progress working through the materials and my devotionals. I was handed a binder filled with the latest (in the 90s, it was conveniently outdated and cherrypicked) scientific research on the origins of homosexuality, which ironically convinced me even more that I was queer. I was given a handy summary of all the mistranslated Bible verses where my very existence is a sin, but it’s okay, as long as I go against my nature at every turn and do what comes naturally to my cishet counterparts. I’M the one that’s unnatural.
This was the late 2000s, by the way.
And this was just casually accepted. My Christian friends acted as my Accountability Partners to make sure I was still wrestling with my attractions and making progress in ignoring them, and I wanted them to. I wanted them all to help me because I genuinely believed I was doomed. I thoroughly believed all of this to my core. They didn’t need to send me away to convert me because it was all around me, and in fact they knew that sending me away would actually ensure the treatment wouldn’t work. When my parents discovered I was queer in 9th grade, I was grounded for two years. But this became increasingly unenforceable as time dragged on and they “trusted” me to be straight. They had already written it off as a colossal failure, and by the time I went off to college, it became clear I had made my decision to live as openly queer.
Except it wasn’t a failure. To this day I am still weeding through the trauma this caused. Yeah I’m queer and trans and proud and I have three-dimensional experiences outside of this, but I couldn’t just reject those teachings and be done with it, I constantly go through periods where I have to slog through it all again. Because it’s not actually about whether you “end up” queer or not, it’s about whether they’ve sewn enough doubt in your brain that you continually struggle with it long after you are under their direct influence. It’s about leaving that door open so that we always have the option to come crawling back when we see the error of our ways. They didn’t need fancy machines or a whole camp for a resounding success, they didn’t even need me to ‘turn’ cishet-- the suffering is the point.
And until I see that piece, what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”, fictional conversion therapy stories will always seem historically inaccurate to me.
(she/her please)
#conversion therapy#cw conversion therapy#cw ex-gay#queer representation#2000s#cw christianity#cw gaslighting#baby me I see you and I love you
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Sea Glass
When it's all overwhelming and he's ready to break down, there are two things that will always help Jimin heal - Jungkook and the sea.
or
Just when Jimin thinks he can't go on any further, his boyfriend whisks him away for a day at the beach where they find how precious a thing memories can be.
Early autumn, 2021
The smell of the sea hit him like a tsunami as soon as he opened the car door. A tidal wave of childhood euphoria and grief both overwhelming his emotions and clenching at his heart in both the best and worst ways.
He remembered being on the beach as a child, his eomma wearing a large floppy hat while she sat under the protection of an umbrella. He could almost taste the gimbap she would bring for their lunch, and feel the stickiness of the patbingsu they used to buy for a treat when the sun got too hot as the sweet ice melted on his fingers.
There were always other children around to play with when he was at the beach. Friends were easily made on the sand and in the waves. He remembered one afternoon in particular, picking up shells and anything else interesting the tide brought in with a boy he met that day and using them to decorate a giant sea turtle they made out of sand. He had an older brother didn’t he? One that played with a group of girls and boys slightly too deep in the sea where their parents couldn’t see what they were doing, but kept Jimin and his friend from bothering them. They swore to be best friends forever, but without their parents to keep them connected what hope did a pair of children that young have? He wondered what he was doing now. Did he recognize Jimin when he saw him on a tv awards show or a picture celebrating his birthday on the side of a bus? Probably not. Jimin doubted he’d know the boy if he saw him now grown to manhood. He hoped that in this crazy pandemic filled world they were safe.
“Are you ok?” he heard Jungkook ask as his boyfriend’s large warm hand enveloped his own. In Jungkook’s hand Jimin felt a sense of security that was at least a tenuous tether to the present. Over the top of his black mask, Jungkook’s eyes looked worried, the galaxies in them alert and attentive. He nodded unconvincingly and Jungkook tightened his grip.
Jimin held onto Jungkook like he was the last life float on a floundering ship, and maybe that was more accurate than he wanted it to be because Jimin did indeed feel like he was sinking, that he was trapped in an ever downward spiral at the moment and his connection to his boyfriend was the only thing keeping him from being completely swept away in this flood of fame and pressure and wealth and anxiety. Another new comeback single, another new music video. Promotions and interviews. Banal advertisements to be filmed. Insipid journalists to be cajoled. Everything they had always done but on an even more difficult level as the company had set their sights on the American money and everything was now being done in English first. As if it wasn’t all difficult enough, now they were expected to continually perform in a foreign language. And to be fair, he could master it, he could endure all of it except for one thing...they were doing it alone. Thanks to this fucking global pandemic, two years later there were still no concerts. Try as he might to maintain it, he felt the connection with ARMY was tenuous at best anymore, the silken thread of fate that had bound them together for years now ready to snap should the wind change but a little.
Certainly Jimin wasn’t the only one suffering, and the company had tried to help them all to continue to draw the energy they needed. At their performances there were walls of screens, banks of screens, and contests for lucky fans to win video calls with yet more screens. There were red carpets but with only a scarce few official photographers, and awards were accepted to the sound of canned applause. It wasn’t, and never could be the same. The sound wasn’t the same. The smell wasn’t the same.
It had never been just about seeing each ARMY individually. Stadium concerts were about experiencing the interaction with the crowd and seeing the crowd interact with each other. The hugs and tears and closeness that was visible to the members even from several feet up and more metres back on stage. At a concert, each fan merged into ARMY, and ARMY melted into Bangtan in the most perfect symbiosis the music world would ever see.
But for now it was all gone, and no one could tell when it would ever return.
Without the fuel that experience provided, there was no way for Jimin to charge his battery. By six months into the pandemic it was drained completely, and that was over a year ago. As much as he wanted to believe otherwise, it seemed this shadow was now a permanent fixture in his life. Masks had always been part of their lives, both for health and privacy, but now they somehow seemed more sinister. Some days he could smile and pretend it was all going to be ok, but today wasn’t one of those days.
“Come on, babe. Breathe. I got you.” Jungkook’s voice was steady and he didn’t let go of Jimin’s hand as he bleeped the keyfob to lock the sleek black Mercedes. Jimin knew that not far away there were two SUVs worth of security detail but for now at least there was the illusion of privacy, so he took a deep breath and tried to smile behind his mask.
“That’s better,” Jungkook whispered approvingly, as he adjusted Jimin’s beanie slightly lower on his face. “Let’s walk.”
The pair were twin souls. They have been for as long as they had known each other, and before, though that didn’t even seem logical. The spirit of the sea swirled in their Busan veins, their moods ebbing and flowing with the tide even when they were landlocked among the grey hi-rises in Seoul. So when it all became too much and Jungkook could see Jimin’s light begin to flicker and fade, he always knew exactly what to do.
The beach was empty, or almost so, just as they (and security) knew it would be. In the late afternoon sun only a few fat gulls were willing to stand the chill coming in off the Yellow Sea. The wind whipped at their clothes, oblivious to the designer labels. When they walked the sand shifted beneath their feet and as they neared the sea Jimin could start to feel the layers of tension slip away until they were so close that each crashing of the waves echoed loudly enough to chase away the creeping darkness that had filtered its way so deeply through the defenses built in his persona it had punctured his soul.
“I’m sorry it’s not Busan,” Jungkook needlessly apologized, as if they would have been allowed the time to travel to the south coast for something as trivial as Jimin’s mental hiccup. “It’s still lovely though.”
“It’s perfect, Koo,” Jimin reassured him, finally speaking for the first time since they arrived. The words brought a sparkle to Jungkook’s eyes that made Jimin wish he had not been so wrapped up in his thoughts and spoken earlier. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
Jungkook wrapped an arm protectively around his waist and pulled him close to kiss his temple, the meaning behind the small gesture magnified by the fact they were in public and could be recognized at any moment.
“Not a problem, babe. You know I’d do anything for you.”
Jungkook unshouldered his large rucksack, settling it into a clear patch of sand where he unfastened the drawstring at the top and withdrew a small wool blanket to spread out on the beach. When the corners were properly weighted down so they wouldn’t blow around in the wind, he sat, legs spread, and patted the ground between his long legs to indicate to Jimin where he wanted him to sit. Jimin was happy to comply, nestling back when Jungkook wrapped his arms around his waist and tucked his head over Jimin’s shoulder. The two watched the view for long moments, the rhythm of the waves steadying the beating of their twinned hearts.
“Did you spend much time on the beach in Busan when you were a kid?” Jungkook asked, trying to find a relaxed and neutral conversation to draw Jimin out of his melancholy.
“Yeah, all the time. My eomma loves the sea. She’d never swim in it but she’d sit under an umbrella and watch it for hours. What about you?”
“Not as much as I liked. I mean from where we lived it wasn’t that far - about an hour by train - but enough of a hassle we didn’t go very often. Plus with both my parents working, they were exhausted on the weekends. We did go a few times though. I still have a jar of bits of stuff I found on the beach when I was a kid in my old bedroom at my parents house. Shells, interesting rocks. Bit of sea glass especially.”
“Awww, I love sea glass too. So pretty. I love thinking about where it might have come from and who held it before I found it.” Jimin closed his eyes to listen to the rhythm of the waves, his breathing steadier now, anchored by the sound of the sea and the beating of his boyfriend’s heart. “I once found a green piece shaped like a heart - or really the boy I was playing with on the beach that day did. Do you ever wonder what happened to kids you met in passing when you were little? Where they are now? If they are healthy and well and happy in this crazy fucked up world?”
He felt the shift in Jungkook’s posture at his words, and heard the nuance in his tone as he whispered in awe.
“A--a heart, you said? Jimin...I…” he stuttered quietly.
Jimin peered over his shoulder to see what had made his boyfriend so flustered only to have his lips met with the warmth of Jungkook’s mouth. His lover’s arms tightened around his waist, pulling him deeper while kissing him over and over -- his cheeks, his forehead, his mouth -- until Jimin felt he was swirling away in an unstoppable current of love. He smiled softly and allowed himself to be swept under until eventually the kisses slowed and he gradually resurfaced, refreshed and renewed. Healed, as he always was, by his boyfriend’s love.
“Babe,” Jungkook whispered into his ear, his breath warm and tickly. “I think I can say for a certainty that at this moment that kid you met is the definitely the happiest man alive.”
─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───
Many years ago, in Busan:
“What do you think it is?” he asked, voice full of awe.
Jimin held the heart shaped item up to eye level, turning it this way and that in the burning light of the Busan summer sun while he stared at it pensively. Finally he nodded and handed the green jewel-like shard back.
“It’s definitely an emerald,” he pronounced with all the expertise the 7 year old could muster. “Nothing else would be that colour of green.”
“A heart shaped emerald! That’s amazing! And what about this one?” his newfound friend asked eagerly as he handed over yet another piece of treasure that he had found as he swept the beach earlier. The smooth edged milky gem sat in the centre of the boy’s extended palm while he eagerly waited for Jimin’s opinion.
“That? That’s definitely a diamond,” Jimin said resolutely as he pointed a chubby finger at the object.
“A diamond!” the child said, eyes impossibly wide in wonder. “Whoa!”
“JIMIN! Hurry up, honey! It’s time to go.”
He turned to look over his shoulder as his mother called for him. She stood further up away from the shoreline, shaking a blanket before neatly folding it and placing it on top of the now packed cooler. Jimin was disappointed but knew it would be pointless to ask for more time. She had already given him another fifteen minutes to play. Twice.
“I’m sorry. I really have to go,” he said as he offered the green sea glass back toward the younger boy. “Remember to keep these safe.”
He stood up and started to brush the sand from his knees but the boy grabbed at his wrist to keep him from leaving.
“WAIT!” he said in a panicked voice.
The boy quickly pushed the heart shaped gem back into Jimin’s hand and held the elder’s fingers closed around it. The feeling of the boy’s hand on his made his skin go all tingly, though he didn’t know why. It was just...nice. Really, really nice. He didn’t want him to let go.
“Here, you keep it,” he said shyly, pink rising from his cheeks to the tips of his ears.
“But they are yours,” Jimin protested. “You found them.”
“It’s ok. I’ll keep the diamond. It’s more valuable right?” Jimin nodded. “You can have the emerald. We’ll see each other again next week right?” the boy ask, wide eyes hopeful. Jimin nodded again, enthusiastically.
“Definitely! I’ll tell Eomma that we need to be back here again next Saturday.”
“Ok, I’ll tell my Eomma too. I’ll definitely be back,” the younger pledged.
For a moment the pair only looked at each other, neither willing to move. To just say good-bye didn’t seem enough but to hug someone you just met today would be weird even if you did spend all afternoon building the coolest sea turtle out of sand together.
“JIMIN!” his mother huffed. “NOW.”
“I-- I’ve gotta go!” Jimin stuttered, and in his flustered rush didn’t even notice until much later that he had hugged the boy anyhow. “I’ll see you next week, Jungkook!”
The doe eyed boy gave such a wide grin that his nose scrunched up like a bunny and he waved enthusiastically at Jimin as he ran back up the beach to his mother.
On the way home, Jimin stared at the treasure he had been given as he turned it over and over in his hand. He knew it wasn’t actually an emerald but didn’t want to disappoint the younger boy who seemed so proud of himself for finding treasure. He loved making the boy smile. It made him feel so good it felt like he had a cloud of butterflies in his tummy. And anyhow, it was still precious to him because it was Kookie that gave it to him. Maybe he would tell him it was only sea glass when he saw him next week so the boy didn’t worry in case he accidentally lost it.
But he didn’t see him next week because the next week it rained.
And the week after they went to visit his grandmother in Changwon.
And even when they did return to the same beach, the boy was nowhere to be seen. Eventually Jimin passed and the boy’s name faded from his memory.
The piece of glass though he kept. A memory of a summer day.
A memory for a lifetime.
─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───
“The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.” ~ Isak Dinesen
─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───/p
If you enjoyed this story, please view my Amazon author page for more information. Thank you for reading!
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Midnight Sun, Chapter 5 - Invitations
This chapter opens up with Weirdo doing what he does best, whining.
In particular, he’s whining this time about how school is hell. Oh, it’s not boring anymore, not just a coma that he has to suffer through to appear normal, but actual genuine hell. He has to be around Bella all the time, you see. He has to exist in the same space as her and it is just misery and woe.
Except, and this is a point that I was going to make back in chapter one when Jasper was doing his freaky little spazz thing about all the tasty good hoomans around them, the Cullens don’t actually HAVE to suffer through the inane slog of Forks High. Think about it for a second. As far as anyone in town knows, Carlisle is a respected doctor (Dr. Kevorkian, but so far he hasn’t been that bad here), and Esme is a soft delicate happy homemaker mama. So why the fuck do they bother going to the public high school? Why would it be out of the realm of posibility to say that Esme home-schools the kids? It keeps them away from the teenagers who could be in very real danger having a bunch of Pire classmates, and it literally leaves them to their own devices. If they wanna spend a week up in Alaska (Weirdo) then no one is going to be the wiser, because they live on the edge of town and the only one with any actual ties to the community at large is Dr, Carlisle.
Maybe they do it because they get bored just being around one another all the time. But everything we’ve seen in the text tells us that even at school, they only hang out with each other and go out of their way to avoid the rest of the school population. It tracks as yet another selfish thing that the Cullens are doing, putting the teenagers of Forks High at risk because they wanna go to normal school, even though they don’t have to.
I’m not even a paragraph in and I just ranted for two. This chapter recap might be a long one, guys.
I'd comforted myself with the fact that her pain would be nothing more than a pinprick - just a tiny sting of rejection - compared to mine.
This is one of those lines that SM uses to hammer home the fact that her Pires are OH SO MUCH better than you. It’s such a blatant ‘Oh, my pain and sorrow and misery is just SO BAD compared to Bella with her weak human mind and weak human emotions. She couldn’t possibly be as hurt as I, the great Edward Cullen, am.’ And it’s trash. It hasn’t been overt enough yet, but there’s still a rant coming about vampire instincts, with which I hope to point out exactly how this sentiment is wrong.
If I was destined to love her
This is one of the main reasons why I just don’t buy the love story aspect of this series. They never talk about love in anything but ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’. Love is hard work. It’s building mutual respect and trust for one another and learning little quirks and habits along the way. It’s bumpy and messy and gross and wonderful, and most of all, it’s a choice. A choice to get to know someone, to spend time with that person and understand their hopes and dreams and wants and needs and fears and all of it, but in Twilight, it feels like the choice is taken away. Alice with her magic future power divines that Weirdo and Bella are gonna be in love, and instead of Eddie boy taking note that he barely even knows Bella, and has spent the better part of the few weeks he’s had with her making wild assumptions about who she is and what she’s like, he just goes ‘Ope, well, I guess if the future says I love her, I love her’ and that’s it. And the worst part is, even after their relationship actually begins, they don’t even try to do that getting to know and trust and respect one another thing, they just flat out keep their wild assumptions about one another throughout the entire series and rely on this ever subjective future that Alice has seen.
Wow, I’m ranting a lot today in this one. I’m not even a third of the way into this chapter yet.
Who would have ever dreamed that such a generic, boring mortal could be so infuriating?
We’re shitting on Mike Newton again, and I have to point something out yet again. Eddie, baby, sweety. You are outright ignoring Bella and treating her like she doesn’t matter in the slightest to you. You stated just before this that you were going out of your way to outwardly ignore her, even while you obsess over her in your mind. You have given only the outward indication of, if not outright disdain, then at the very least indifference to this girl and yet you’re giving Mike shit for having a crush on a girl and actually fucking acting on it. He talks to her, he attempts poorly to flirt with her and ask her out, even though we all know that she’s just as obsessed with you and compares Mike to a dog (because Bella is a piece of shit, too, so at least you have that in common). So stop shitting on poor Mike, who’s only crime is liking a girl who isn’t interested in him.
He'd created a Bella in his head that didn't exist
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU’VE FUCKING DONE, EDWARD. And honestly? Yours is even worse because you don’t even BOTHER trying to FUCKING TALK TO HER TO GET TO KNOW HER. You just spy on her conversations with other people and assume that you know everything about her! Bella goes out of her way to put on this fake little show for her classmates and lie to them about everything she feels and thinks about them, but at least they FUCKING TALK TO HER! So yeah, I agree, Mike doesn’t have the full picture of who Bella really is (and if he did, he absolutely would not still have that little crush on her because Bella is a big fucking jerk), but at least they’re MAKING THE EFFORT!
Bella was good.
This is just not true and I have four books worth of canon to prove it.
I frequently amused myself by imagining backhanding him across the room and into the far wall...
“It helps if you think of them as people.” Remember that, Eddie??? Now here’s the thing. We’ve all had those fantasies about people. Wanting to throw them across the room or punch them in the face or whatever. The difference here? Edward is well aware that his Magic Pire Strength would genuinely hurt Mike, so much so that the very next line is about how it ‘probably’ wouldn’t hurt him fatally. Meaning that Eddie is well aware that it would hurt him, probably even break a few bones, but hey, he probably won’t die! Fuck you, Edward.
For all I knew, she never thought about me at all.
Pointedly gonna look over at Twilight now and see just how fucking much Bella is obsessing over Eddie, to the point where any thought not centered around her Woobie Pire is glossed over and ignored.
Eddie is having a jealous baby fit and once again thinking about how he would just love to hurt poor Mike for having the gall and audacity to ask Bella out. I already ranted about it up there, and I’m too tired and annoyed to do it again. Just know that Edward is a fucking asshole and poor Mike doesn’t deserve any of the shit that gets forced on him in this series.
Eddie is finally paying attention to Bella again, and wondering what she’s thinking, and he does that a lot in this book. I know that it’s supposed to be because he’s relied on his shitty vampire super power for so long, but considering how often he demanded (yes, demanded) to know what she was thinking in canon, and wouldn’t let up until she caved and told him, it feels like he’s trying to monitor her thoughts. She can’t be thinking anything that Daddy Ed doesn’t approve of, after all.
I picked the correct answer out of his head
But the Cullens are just super smart and know things and definitely aren’t cheating cheaters who cheat to get perfect grades in school.
"Are you speaking to me again?"
This is a problem with this canon. These people have had TWO conversations. In one of them, it was banal and inane small talk about the fucking weather and why Bella moved to Forks, and in the other, Eddie was gaslighting her to make her think she was wrong about what happened in the Van Of Doom(tm) crash. They haven’t talked like, at all. They don’t know anything about one another besides what they’ve crafted in their own empty heads. Bella is obsessing about how Eddie must hate her and Eddie is obsessing about how this version of Bella he’s built up in his head must be so amazing and wonderful and touting about how he loves her. There isn’t love in this relationship. There isn’t even a relationship. These people are obsessed stalkers.
I managed not to laugh.
This is another example of Edward being just... the biggest fucking jerk. Clearly, Bella is upset. She’s jumped to the wrong conclusion, and assumes that Eddie just wants her to fucking die or whatever, but she’s clearly upset and annoyed and Eddie is treating her feelings like a joke. He does that so often in the series, but hearing it from his own perspective really drives it home.
Edward is being extremely shallow watching Eric and Tyler asking Bella out. He makes a rude comment about Eric’s skin (he’s a teenage boy with acne, oh GOD) and outright calls Tyler ‘average’ as if he knows anything about him. This is another problem with Ed and his magic surface thought listening power. I’ve already pointed out that he’s created this image of who Bella is in his head based on absolutely nothing, but he’s done this with everyone around him. He assumes what kind of people they are based on the very bare, surface thoughts they have. He doesn’t consider the people around him complex, because he isn’t diving into their more complex thoughts and emotions, and that’s just so gross and shitty.
How was I any better than some sick peeping tom?
We know what this is, right? We’re witnessing the birth of Eddie breaking into Bella’s house and watching her sleep. He’s once again acknowledging that he shouldn’t be doing it, and he knows that its wrong, so of course, that means he can just keep on doing it anyway.
I was not the one she was destined to say yes to.
This is such a ham-fisted attempt at keeping the ‘will they won’t they’ illusion up, because its been made so obvious from the word GO that there’s never going to be anyone else for Bella. Even the attempt at a love triangle doesn’t work in the series because SM made it so clear all throughout New Moon that Bella would never choose Jacob if Edward was a choice. Everything she did in New Moon was to keep the illusion of Edward up in her mind, and even spending time with Jacob was a means to that end goal. Its not a compelling love story because, as stated, there is no love here because they haven’t spoken to one another, but their sick, driving obsession with one another is going to guide them all the way to the end. Edward and Bella are not a good couple, and I wish very much that that line up there was the truth, and that Bella discovered who she was as a person and found someone to compliment her.
My life was an unending, unchanging midnight. It must, by necessity, always be midnight for me. So how was it possible that the sun was rising now, in the middle of my midnight?
Left that full for context. This is our title drop, and as someone who has read all of Twilight, who has seen all of the horrible title drops in them, I honestly think this one might be the worst of them all. It’s just this affected way that SM writes and it really, really irks me to see it so blatantly on display combined with a ‘hee hee, Midnight Sun, get it~’ on top of it.
My self, also, had frozen as it was - my personality, my likes and my dislikes, my moods and my desires; all were fixed in place.
This has a lot of implications for the Pires that SM never even bothers to explore because she doesn’t actually realize the potential in it. According to canon, right there in that sentence, when they’re turned Pires STOP CHANGING. They don’t develop new interests or hobbies, they don’t change their taste in music, film, anything. They become truly frozen in time. That means that the Cullens should not be driving cars, or wearing the clothes that they wear. They should not have picked up all of these skills that immortality has allowed them to pick up. The should be the exact same as they were the day they were turned. There’s something really dark and genuinely heartbreaking about that, and a better author would have explored it. Unfortunately, we don’t have a better author.
if I were going to attempt any kind of relationship with her
Edward refuses to take into account that that is not solely his decision to make. Pretend for a second that Bella is a normal human with normal thoughts. All she has seen of Eddie is this hot and cold thing were he does a nice thing or has a nice conversation with her and then ices her out for days and weeks at a time. He is, by all accounts, a total jerk and kind of a weirdo. Why the hell would she (again, if she were a normal, rational person) want a relationship with him?
Strange, unfamiliar reactions stirred deep in my forgotten human core.
AKA, Eddie just felt the first stirrings of being a horny teenage boy. Gross.
The chapter ends on Eddie asking Bella to let him drive her to Seattle. I know I’ve already made this point, but if Bella were a normal teenage girl experiencing all of this shit from Eddie, she would have absolutely laughed in his face and told him to go fuck himself on a cactus or something. He’s proven to be volitale, rude, condescending, and just an outright jerk. There is no reason a sane, rational person would want to go anywhere with him. Would want to spend any time alone with him. If anything, Bella should be thinking that Eddie wants to get her alone to murder her or something based on the way he’s acting. It’s creepy and weird. Bella, unfortunately, eats this shit up and is so excited about her date with him.
That’s it. Chapter over. Sorry this was such a long one, folks, but I’m not sure they’re gonna get any shorter. This story makes me angry, and when I get angry, I rant. Feel free to reach out in messages or DMs if you wanna chat more about this book or offer suggestions for the next one I should do after I finally put this one to bed.
You can also buy me a snack if you want, I have my CashApp tag in my bio. Until next time.
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like, circling back around after a week or two, I still feel that the very worst part about “truscum” rhetoric and thought is its complete inability to understand what actually motivates “tucute” rhetoric
and of course I think that privilege is a factor here -- racial and class-based privilege in particular, but also just good fortune in local medical practice -- insofar as it allows transmedicalists to refuse to come to terms with the very good reasons that people have to mistrust doctors and the medical establishment. you need a certain latitude to ignore medical abuse and deprivation before you can ignore the brute fact that a lot of trans people want or need to live their trans lives in a way that has no room for medicalization
but the other factor, which is equally banal and just about as blindly evil, is that transmedicalists are just the fucking fun police.
and like, in the spirit of empathy and understanding, I can say that I don’t think this is actually malevolent on their part; it basically comes from a place of not wanting their gender-dysphoric suffering to be made light of, not from a place of hating fun in itself
but the thing is -- regardless of whether it’s because they’re drowning in their pain too quickly to help anyone else swim, or just blinkered by popular rhetoric about the transgender “trend” as a seductive social contagion -- transmedicalists are terminally incapable of recognizing their own suffering in other people. when I say this, what I mean is that they often can’t recognize when the “tucutes” they rail against are actually in the same bucket of unfun gender-dysphoric pain as they are. (and that’s not actually to say that all “tucutes” are gender-dysphoric as a sweeping statement of fact; it’s only to speak of the way transmedicalists often treat those who make light of being trans, and the way they often make assumptions about those who make light of being trans.)
I think a lot of transmedicalists are aware of their blindness on some level, which is why some of the most cogent and the least inoffensive transmedicalists will try and sit down and explain to “tucutes” that they’re deeply confused. “look, you say that you don’t need gender dysphoria in order to be trans, but none of the alternatives you present are any different from gender dysphoria. telling your doctor about your gender euphoria and desire to be another gender would just get you a gender dysphoria diagnosis. you fall under the gender dysphoria umbrella. nobody is being excluded here!”
but the follow-on problem is that even these thoughtful transmedicalists don’t seem to have really emotionally internalized this awareness. they haven’t thought the facts through to really consider the consequences -- if the “tucutes” you’re talking to are simply real gender dysphoric trans people just like you, then what true emnity can you possibly have for those “tucutes”? how can you rail against people who are just like you, who have only been confused?
like, waging a war for the sake of the map instead of the sake of the territory isn’t exactly new for us trans people, but is this the particular map the hill you want to die on?
I think a lot of transmedicalists betray their influences, here, and I think a lot of transmedicalists have been influenced by regressive rhetoric in particular; namely, the rhetoric of queerness as a social contagion. a lingering anxiety that some trans people (young trans people and/or “tucutes” in particular) might be misled cis people replicates very cleanly the quintessential conservative anxieties regarding queerness and gender variance: the reactionary fear that queerness and gender variance might merely be choices made by the self-absorbed, as dangerously indulgent self-pleasures to be suppressed lest they overwhelm the body politic in a turning-away from responsibility. an anxiety directed at “transtrenders” replaces the conservative sexualization of queerness (as a participation in a forbidden but obviously-delicious fruit) with a more innocent kind of self-pleasure, but the joy of participation in such a passing fad is no less irresponsible or self-destructive than such a conservative vision of queerness would be.
whatever the exact cause, transmedicalists misunderstand those who would make light of being trans: they misunderstand on a very basic level the drives that lead one to make light of being trans in the first place, because they attribute those drives to misled cis people instead of to trans people. transmedicalists and “truscum” look at trans people searching for some joy and good humor and redemption in the fallout of their lives, and they see cis people trivializing the trans experience, if not outright mocking it
and if ever transmedicalists and “truscum” have done something unforgivable in my eyes, it would be precisely that, because there’s little that trans people need more than a chance to redeem the trans experience; there’s little that we need more than a way to believe that our lives as trans people don’t completely suck.
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I decided that this year, I will make a resolution. This in itself is a bit revolutionary, because I’ve always been the anti-traditionalist, anti-precedent, just anti-. This year is different, because it started off in a fever pitch, whined to a rotten crescendo, and now is whimpering to a close. At the literal beginning of this year, my mental and physical health had taken a major shit in the proverbial bed. I started the New Year terrified, and sick with worry. I had been hospitalized against my will, in a psych ward, and found myself creeping through a very real life version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I had a delusional roommate, haunted by The Man, who watched her and hurt her. Hurt her though food, through medicine, invaded her life, drained her bank accounts, made it so she couldn’t sleep. Now that I was her roommate, he was watching me too, and I couldn’t close any doors, take a shower, or shut my eyes. There was the drooling, heavy lidded non-verbal man, who shuffled through the hallways attached to an IV, and had one hand permanently lifted and dangling. There was the angry kid, who yelled obscenities, and complained about the bullshit, his medication, how he was treated, only to periodically break down in tears and screaming, and had to go into the Quiet Room. The Quiet Room was a very small space, complete with bed decked out in restraints. The only thing missing was the padded walls and the straight jacket. But that would be undignified. A nurse stood behind a little window, distributing drugs at specific times. I asked her why she broke the pills out of the blister pack, into a paper cup, and tipped the paper cup into my waiting hand. Why not just break the pills from the blister pack into my hand. It’s the same amount of touching by the both of us, and then they could reduce that additional waste and cost. My mind works like that. She didn’t know, that’s how they did it.
That week felt like a month, just like this year felt like a new lifetime. Since then, I’ve been going to therapy, seeing doctors, paying attention to my diet, getting regular sleep, and working on the rats nest that is my brain. It’s what you do, and it’s all good and healthy and mindful, and positive. But what I’ve been really struggling with, is the anxiety. My anxiety rips through me like a cancer. It denatures and decays every day, no matter when it arises. All the good I ever did is wiped away, and I’m left with grime and ash. It used to stay in my head, but now it’s ventured out mycelium-esque threads into my body. It makes me weak, it takes the ground out from under me, my heart machine over heats, my fulel expels and lays wasted, my body-cage aches...
It is what it is.
I am circling the drain. I’ve been here before, I’ve seen this movie, and the ending does no justice. Leitmotifs are small, recurring, characteristic of a composition; so much so that they become the composition. I don’t want to be this ring-cycle, I wont cement this reality through repetition. And so, I’ve decided to wage an attack on this misery. An attack in the form of a Happiness War, to make the goal of happiness as if it were a life or death situation. To furiously, religiously, and zealously seek Happiness with an intensity alike to terror; only matched by the ferocity of the terror inside.
So I make a stand, I screw my courage to the sticking place and screw my fear and stick it to my panic. I choose, I chase, I become a champion of happiness. It is the only choice. I remember a story I once heard. A man was telling his friend about hunting rhino in Africa. It had been a long hunt, and he had finally come to meet his prey. The rhino was a dense, black, death machine of a beast. He fired, but missed. His second shot jammed the rifle. Panicked, he looked around, there was nothing but grass in every direction. No weapon, no tree, no rocks to climb. Just grass, heat, and angry rhino. He could hear the rhino’s approach like thunder, he could very nearly feel the animals hot breath on his neck. Entranced in the tale, his friend asked, “So what did you do?” “I climbed a tree right in the nick of time!” He said. “What tree?”, the friend asked, “You said there was no tree!” “Don’t you see?”, answered the man, “There has to be a tree, there is always a tree, you have to look for it, but that is the point of my story. There is always a tree. Find the tree.”
I take constant support and inspiration from this story. Where there is life, there are more stories. So you do the damn thing until it’s dead, or you are. Never give up, never surrender. There is always another way, even when the rhino is upon you. It is always darkest before the dawn, you just hold on. Find the tree.
Part 1. Gratitude
I did an informal poll, and asked my friends on social media some questions about Happiness. It’s a pretty banal question, and definitely leads to a lot of cliches and derivative content. But even though the question has been asked so many times, to the point of being historical, it still echos in the collective heads of many. So here we go, here we go, here we go again. The way that I research and make decisions is such: I read as much as I can about my subject, and disregard the biases of each individual body of work, even though I know that there are definite biases. Instead, I look for repetition. Despite people’s stance or mediated perceptions, I believe that there are certain, close to absolute truths that will emerge, if given enough experience or exposure. This way of digesting information began when I was grade school aged, and learned about the Free Marketplace Theory. Basically, you give everyone a chance, and the quality items will rise to the top, and prove themselves by their worth. No monopolies, no deceitful practices, no bull. This sounds like a great way to go about scholarly work, but you can imagine me trying to buy sponges, or find recipes, or, most everyday things.
So, one of the threads of commonality that I noticed when asking people about their Happiness, is gratitude. Either as a precursor or an after effect, I see a theme of being happy because of what you have. Interestingly enough, it seems that gratitude is interwoven with a sense of, “It could be worse, but it isn’t”. This strikes me as odd, because it seems that a sense of misery, or acute un-Happiness, is necessary for Happiness to exist. One of my friends wrote this, “Hammocks without spiders. Water when I’m thirsty. Really cold soda on a hot day.” This seems like a simple, light-hearted, cute statement, but look at the profound presence of suffering. To experience the relaxation of a lovely hammock, she apparently had previously experienced a hammock that came with spiders. Good god. That seems like a nightmarish exercise in vulnerability. Yet, it is that horror, that leads her to appreciate each spider-free hammock session, and even more; to list it as one of the top things that make her happy. We run from misery, we avoid it, we do everything we can to keep it at bay. But it’s the other side of happiness. To experience Happiness, apparently you have had to sit in the Shit for a while. I’ve thought about the Shit before, and have come to this similar conclusion. When you are faced with the question of, “Why is this happening to me?” Or the ever-popular, “ Why do bad things happen to good people?”, perhaps the answer is, “So they can learn to be very fucking Happy”.
Two key takeaways here: 1. Caveat- The bad things, the Shit, cannot kill you. If it does, then the conversation is over. Don’t let it kill you, if you can. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Where there is life, there is hope, and more story. For those of us who suffer from suicidal tendencies or ideation, this is a point that needs to be made, for we are the ones in the strange position of being both powerless, and the only one with the power over our lives. 2. The Shit cannot become your life. If the Shit is all you see when you look around, you can never gain perspective. You won’t be able to learn from it if you can’t get some sort of distance. Distance, or progress, is the very mechanism of the story. The shit is your conflict, and conflict is the very catalyst that moves the story, into its rising action and climax. In other, plainer words, that Shit has to move, man. A story that ends before or at its climax is bullshit. It’s an artsy literary move, but for me, that’s just lazy writing. Having your audience choose their own ending saves you from having to write THE ENTIRE REST OF THE STORY. Work that Shit, move through that Shit, don’t let it be everything. That’s just shitty.
2. Progress
A therapy that I’ve just began exploring is ACT, or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. If you’ve ever even dipped a toe into any sort of counseling or self help, chances are, you’ve come across some form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s like the Gold Standard of psychological treatment. It’s based on the idea that your psychological and behavioral issues are based in faulty thinking and or behavior. It’s rooted in repetition, an endless cycle of catching bad thoughts, and turning them into better ones. Often, you literally find the opposite of that negative thought, or look for evidence to support or deny it. You also try to find origins or deeper causes of the negative behavior. The idea is that if you do these exercises long enough, the repetition forms new connections, and new habits. It’s super boring. It works. ACT takes a lot of the same models found in CBT, with one difference. Instead of fighting your negative thoughts, you first accept them. It’s in the name. So, you still go through the rigamorole of identifying your negative thoughts, and trying to find their origins and evidences. However, one deviation that I’ve found really helpful is that there is no way not to choose. By not doing something, you are choosing NOT that thing. Given that you’ve already made a choice, acknowledge that choice. Now that you’ve made a stance, decide the quality of that stance. If you are someone like me, who’s fight, flight, or freeze sympathetic nervous system most often chooses to freeze, and when frozen, reconciles itself into the form of a panic attack, this mode of CHOICE makes a huge difference. Let me lay it out for you in this example:
Conflict: I don’t know what to do with my life, I’m aimless, unmotiviated, torn. It’s too late for me, I can’t do it, I’m not good enough.
Assuming you’ve already gone through your basic reframing thoughts, positive thoughts, SMART goals checklist, you might end with something that looks like this.
I don’t know if getting a Nursing Degree is right for me. It makes sense, and I’ve already put a lot of effort into it, but it’s not what I love. I love foraging, herbalism and dietetics. However, those fields are not sustainable, feasible, or a good fiscal degree. I don’t know what to do.
But today, right now, I am currently not actively pursuing a nursing degree. So, today, I’ve chosen not to pursue a nursing degree.
For some people and some situations, this in and of itself, brings a deep clarity, a relief, and a resolution. But if it doesn’t...
Acknowledge your choice: For the next week, I choose to not pursue a nursing degree. I’m not going to exert energy thinking about it, arguing with myself about it, it is a non issue. I am not pursuing this. What’s left? The foraging, the herbalism, the dietetics. This is your stance.
Now that you’ve made that stance, think about the quality. What kind of herbalist am I going to be? How far am I going to take this? What opportunities can I find?
The idea here is that you’ve redirected the energy you would have spent arguing with yourself, and instead are now pointed toward a more productive path. You may circle back to the original decision, but now, you’ve moved forward in the journey instead of being stuck at the beginning quandary. You’ve expanded.
3. Presence
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i just woke up, it’s close to noon here, five hours is good enough i guess. i keep thinking about college and how fucking suicidally depressed i was then and how ive spent half of this year being unemployed and generally just struggling to take care of myself in the most banal and basic ways possible, and how depression really does just delete years from your life. you live through them in a daze, you’re already a ghost, you’re already dead. questing in wrath of the lich king is honestly some of the last shit i remember concretely before going into a two year gray area of passing my classes and nothing else. i remember breaking up with my boyfriend because he chose raiding over me. i dont want to talk about it again. the memory is still painful. still, even still, ten years later. and in late 2008 i was attacked in my dorm room and i was screaming and my roommates thought i was being a big ol slut. they thought any guy that came over was someone i was fucking. when i went to blizzcon in 2008 and my brother stayed in my dorm they thought i was fucking him too until i told them he was my little brother. they tried so fucking hard to suppress my interests and make me “like them”. “there’s more to life than world of warcraft and pokemon” they said as if going to college basketball games and rewatching disney movies has any more enrichment or depth beyond what i was fucking doing. my life is so full of hatred, from myself, from other people, just being fostered in me in general, and it’s only within the last few years that i’ve gotten to heal from it at all, all the time being hurt more and more
i was talking to a friend yesterday who is just 19 and thinking about where i was when i was 19, which of course puts me in 2009 again, the year i dropped out of existence, and i was telling them about how i was essentially raised by the ilk of 4chan and the piece of shit community on wow that, like, since i’m around ~liberal genderqueer~ tumblr-type spaces all the time, genuinely shocks me to remember still exists, of those fucking hypermasculine overcompensating military dudes. and we were talking about how like, nerds in general tend to have shit social skills or anxiety or are Othered in ways that have them reinforce this piece of shit pecking order where the loudest and meanest proclaim themselves the Leader and everyone just follows them because theyre too meek to challenge them or they mistake arrogance for confidence and assume any asshole crowing that loud about how Right they are all the time Must Be Right.
and i thought of my own life, my ex QP, my old friend groups, my abusive ex boyfriend, how i mistook so long their malice as strength, how i was duped by their self-aggrandizement. they had no skills, no talents, no girlfriend (except when i dated them), no women in their lives in general, no real friends they could count on (except, for my abuser, an older man with 3 children and a brand new divorce whose house he muscled and manipulated himself into—”i cant even bear to be in the old master bedroom anymore”—and my abuser promptly MOVED HIMSELF INTO IT) no hobbies, and the one or two hobbies that they had—fishing, video games—they were fucking less-than-passable at. my ex-qp wasn’t good at video games. he would use cheat codes or just play the strongest character and rely on everyone else to pick up his slack. warrior, carry, tank, what have you; all of us his underlings to support him to victory—”I’m doing all of the damage and getting none of the kills”—he would whine, oblivious to the concept of teamwork and seeking credit within the only realm he had a semblance of succeeding in.
anyway so when i first joined tumblr i swung the pendulum in the other direction because i absolutely had to, it was for my survival to become a virulent feminazi as they put it, and i was obnoxious about it, and i reposted rape statistics all the time and challenged people all the time because i had to. i had to let it overtake me in order to purge all of the 10+ years of toxic social conditioning that places like 4chan and their little infestations in WoW and all of my abusive partners instilled in me. i had to be vocal about rape this and sexual assault that because i spent the better part of my adolescence trying to laugh away the fact that i was raped as a child, trying to make jokes about my “delicious flat chest” and pedobear and “surprise buttsecks/it’s not rape if you yell surprise” and “delicious loli”; some of the images i had willingly saved on my ancient hard drive are absolutely harrowing to go through now as an adult knowing my mushy impressionable 14 year old traumatized mind was trying to cope with and gloss over what had happened to me and with the future i was facing as a budding adolescent in this kind of environment. men didnt want to be responsible for what happened to me or with what would happen to me, it made them uncomfortable for me to talk about it, so i was told to laugh it away, that nobody cares that i was raped, that i was stronger if i could just laugh about it, that no topics were beyond reproach or off limits, and that if i wasnt desensitized to my own suffering then i was weak, i was a sheep, i was a burden, i was letting my emotions get the better of me.
obviously, tumblr as a whole DIRECTLY acts in opposition of this: everything is rooted in our traumas, which we are expected to lay bare for all to be taken seriously: 4chan demanded that we invalidate the trauma by making a joke of it and allowing the masses to pick it apart for their own entertainment, to become part of the anonymous “legion” by offering up our individuality to be consumed by the group (as a currency of “lulz”, basically); tumblr, reflexively, demands we validate the trauma by making it an open and public integral asset to our identity, to have easily digestible and categorized characteristics so as to fit into the tumblr hierarchy of needs, their own misinterpreted facsimile and microcosm of existing systematic oppression, and obtain a sort of fixed currency of privilege or “woke points” dependent on identity politics. so i definitely needed to purge my previous conditioning with this reclamation of my identity as a survivor, etc, and had about 7 years of misplaced anger and fury condensed into a good two or so years instead, and even now im still parsing details.
it wasnt until i was 22 that i had even heard the term asexuality and it wasnt until i was 25 that i realized i was bi (or “could be” bi), even though i had already been in love with and sexually active with women years prior lmao. i had been told by every possible source that having a dick inside me would change my life and change my outlook and change me into a better person or whatever the fuck, that i would “understand” and “grow up” and “become a woman” or whatever and guess what it did fucking NOTHING, just like every teen drama romance or whatever tries to stress over and over, sex is not a magical lifechanging event that hands you a million dollars and a healthy brain. it changes your life in some ways and it’s definitely not something to be taken lightly but in no way is it a cure for anything.
i dont know where i’m going with this, im just fucking pissed off about my life, im pissed off that healing takes so long and that i had to do any of it in the first place. im so pissed about all of my time wasted with this fucking piece of shit body and fucking piece of shit brain and i wish i could just go back to work and be a functional human being but im like just a short leap away from doing any of that. i have to get in touch w my previous HMO once the new year starts now that im confirmed for medi-cal, and i should have done it months ago, but i have to just accept that this whole time ive been not USELESS but just utterly CONSUMED by self-preservation, that it is taking most of my effort to want to be alive and stay on this planet any longer. especially now with my teeth bugging me so bad because i cant fucking take care of myself so im grinding my teeth and clenching my jaw and i guess eating improperly or what have you idont fucking know. im going to buy a waterpik even though it’s fifty dollars and i have not made ANY MONEY in the last 6 months or done ANY of what i wanted to do and i still have a number of commissions needling at me that i genuinely like cant fucking even look at withotu fucking hitting myself and crying, and im seriously not trying to make fucking excuses, i am so fucking ashamed and consumed by self-hatred about this, this has been a problem for me SINCE COLLEGE where i was an ART MAJOR that i had to fucking beat the shit out of myself to try to draw anything “seriously”, and i do mean literally beating myself, bludgeoning myself with my morris sticks and smacking myself in the face/head and clawing at my skin, and i fucking hate it
i just know i need like SO MUCH recovery or healing or whatever the fuck, i feel so long overdue for very basic shit, and part of me feels like a withering plant, like pouring water over dry leaves thinking it’s just going to saturate itself and be instantly rejuvenated. im losing leaves in the process, as it were, and getting no “water” all this time. i feel like i’m in drought mode. these last six months are me basically conserving all i have, toeing away from the edge of the cliff because iw as so ready yall i was so fucking ready, i was ready to jump off, i spent whole lunch hours just ready to fucking leap, staring down the void, staring at the winding road that went up the mountain, staring at the deer who stared back at me, hiding my face from Adults who treated me like a wind-up doll, i just couldnt take it, ic ouldnt be somewhere that sterile, i couldnt be spending so much of my life getting so little back, i coudlnt see my friends ever, i couldnt breathe, but in general my brain is sick and i need to heal from all of these things, i need to figure out how i can cope with being alive because i am going to be alive at least a little longer and i need to not fear and crave death simultaneously. i do not want to die, I DO NOT want to die, but i cannot live in a constant state of recuperating. my life has just felt like the Shutting Down... screen for the last 2 years.
NEED a new dentist NEED my teeth fixed PLEASE GOD open the stem cell dentin treatment to clinics worldwide GOD fix my TEETH PLEASE let me REGROW my TEETH NEED therapy NEED to fix my brain NEED to figure out how i can cope with being unable to support myself in this shit fucking economy NEED TO RECOVER NEED TO GET BETTER PLEASE IM FUCKING SUFFERING
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Newt giving Percival massage using fancy oils from the other side of the world? Percival had a very long, tiring day at work and seeing how tense he is, Newt asked if Percival wouldn't like a massage - Percival simply melts under Newt's hands.
Oh, this is dangerously bordering on smut, but I’ll leave that for another time *winks*
A bit deviated, because they’re not in an established relationship there, oops. And second oops, have another one-shot lengthy thing.
Graves was dead tired. Not your usual type of tired. He simply had a torturing day at MACUSA’s headquarters that day, and he questioned himself: why didn’t Grindelwald use this type of torture instead of his plain Cruciatus? Because Graves was sure, if Grindelwald gave him tons of paperwork and told him that the American wizarding community depended on how he succeeds, then he’d exhaust himself to the point of dying.
And as if to torture him some more, Seraphina ordered him to check up on the junior aurors, who investigated a banal thievery case. Thing which resulted with a caught niffler, an injured junior, and with Graves’ back almost being broken. Because Cooper didn’t know if you point your wand at a desk and Accio it, then it will fly directly in your face. Even if it happened while trying to stop the niffler.
Graves, naturally, being responsible of his subordinates’ well-being, - Mercy Lewis, give him strength - rushed to get the unfortunate idiot from under the desk, which unceremoniously squashed the guy under itself. It was a massive desk, made of hard wood, and it was heavy as hell. He did try to use wandless magic, even a verbal spell with his wand, but as he will find out moments later, the surprises didn’t finish.
The desk was spelled, the magic didn’t work on it. Graves groaned and used all of his physical strength to get the poor guy out. He had at least three broken ribs and his chest was heavily raising and falling. Obviously he had difficulties with his respiration, so by the time the other newbies ran back and forth after the little thief, Graves took the guy in his hands and apparated them directly to MACUSA’s hospital.
Leaving junior auror Cooper in the care of experienced hands, he went back to his office, back to his new prison cell, back to the pile of never ending documents. He shrugged off his coat and just when he wanted to finally sit, to relax a goddamned second, Tina barged in and Graves let out a sigh, rubbing a hand down his face.
“What is it, Goldstein?“ he hissed at her.
“Mr. Graves, sir, Mr. Scamander wants to talk to you about one of his beasts-“
“Tell him to come in.“ he cut her blabbering by raising a hand.
“Sure.“ she disappeared through the door of his office and after a moment of stretched silence - while he still was standing - a hesitant knock on his door made him roll his eyes in annoyance.
“Come in, Scamander.”
“Mr. Graves?“ A ginger head peeked inside and then a full body, wrapped in that blue coat with a case dragged after, made its appearance as well.
“Scamander,“ Graves started carefully, eyeing the slumped shoulders and ducked head of the Brit. He knew it. Somewhere, deep inside, he fucking knew it. “don’t tell me that bloody niffler is yours.“
Newt’s head snapped up “Did you find him? Where is he? You didn’t treat him badly, did you?“
Graves didn’t like that accusatory tone. Like he was evil, and killed or maltreated everyone- every magical beast he crossed paths with.
He clicked his tongue “Scamander, your niffler caused such a disaster, you’ll have to use Reparo over and over for some hours straight.“ Newt ducked his head again, but watched Graves intently from under that messy fringe of his. Graves could feel those eyes burning holes in his chest. “Your niffler was captured, and is safe.“
Newt relaxed visibly “Can I…?“ he asked uncertain.
“Yeah, of course you can. But-“ Graves stopped, eyeing the brown leather case “for Lewis’ sake, Scamander, repair those latches and make sure no one escapes anymore.“
“Oh, s-sure, Mr. Graves, thank you very much.“ Newt beamed, holding onto his case with both hands and ready to dash out any moment.
Graves waved a hand in a dismissing gesture and sat down on his chair.
All the bloody nifflers and spelled desks in the world, what the fuck.
A pain shot right through his spine and he growled. Or yelled. Or started cursing loudly. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, because holy shit, the pain dulled all of other senses, shooting through him whenever he moved a goddamn muscle.
Perhaps he was older than he thought of himself.
Newt hurried over, holding his head in those hands and Graves tried to blink the tears out of his eyes before focusing on the man in front of him.
“Mr. Graves, what happened? Mr. Graves, where hurts?“
Graves swatted his hands in annoyance “Scamander,“ he hissed and groaned as another wave of hellish pain washed over him “fuck you.“
He paid no attention to Newt’s baffled look, and continued cursing “You, your bloody niffler, Picquery, Cooper - that imbecile, the freaking spelled desk and my age. Fuck everything.“ he finished and tried to stand up, only to fall back into his chair and howl in pain, this time he was sure.
“Mr. Graves.“
Probably Scamander didn’t understand just how much he suffered, probably he wanted to make him suffer some more-
“Let’s get you home and I’ll take care of… everything.“ Newt said, and when Graves looked at him, glared at him, his glare was met with nothing but determination.
Scamander was determined to kill him completely.
Newt helped him up and Accio’ed his case before grabbing firmly onto his hand.
“Lead the way, Mr. Graves.“ Newt told him and Graves pondered for a moment there, that it was much better to die at home, on his comfortable bed than in this office, in this gigantic pile of papers.
Graves apparated both of them into his appartment and supported himself off a wall. Newt propped him up and dragged into his bedroom. Graves was kind of taken aback by the strength in those hands.
Newt put him carefully on the bed and easing himself out of his coat, vest and rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, he demanded “Take off your clothes, Mr. Graves.“
Graves sputtered and looked up at him as if Newt grew another head. What the fuck, Scamander?
“Scamander, if you want to kill me, I prefer to die clothed, thank you very much.“
“W-what?“ Newt’s eyebrows shot up in surprise “What made you think so, h-how even-?“
“I don’t know.“ Graves said and winced. His body surely wanted him dead, for example.”Because we caught your niffler and all that.“
“That little bugger deserved to be caught, I wanted to catch him myself, but you were faster, I suppose.” Newt explained as his hand worked on Graves’ vest and only when he took it off and started unbuttoning Graves’ shirt, that snapped out of his haze.
“Scamander, what the hell. I’m capable of undressing myself.“ he said and tried to shrug off his shirt. Another wave of pain abused the muscles of his back. He shuddered and grimaced at the feeling.
“Mr. Graves, Percival, please.“ Newt said softly “Let me take care of it. Okay?“
Graves nodded absentminded, and let Newt push him gently onto his bed.
“I’ll be right back in a minute.“ Graves heard Newt say through the increasing pulse beating in his ears. The pain was insufferable. Not as that one caused by the Cruciatus curse, obviously, but really close.
In what seemed to be like eternity, - in fact only two or so minutes - Newt was back and holding a lot of small colorful bottles. He made Graves lie on his stomach, helping him to flip carefully, then poured something on Graves back and after that, Graves legit thought he died, because this was heaven, for sure.
The pain slowly was reduced and Graves could finally breathe properly and not suffocate because of it. He felt Newt’s hands roaming all over his back, rubbing oils into his skin, massaging his sore muscles using just the right amount of pressure.
Another bottle opened and the room was filled with a sweet scent. Graves found himself humming in contentment as his limbs became all mushy.
Newt chuckled and it was such a pretty sound, Graves wanted to hear more of it.
“These were a gift from a tribe in South Africa.“ A thumb traced up and down Graves’ vertebral column “They were really grateful when I treated their chimaera-” Newt stopped himself abruptly and slapped himself mentally for mentioning such a highly illegal and dangerous beast in the presence of an auror, the director of Magical Security himself.
But Graves didn’t really catch that, or better said, didn’t even want to, because thinking of something else while having those hands on him, was a crime itself.
Newt kept rubbing and massaging and Graves lost himself in sensations completely. He drifted off to sleep in the middle of it.
He woke up in the morning to a ginger head pressed closely to his side and Newt Scamander wrapped in a blanket next to him, on his bed, snoring lightly and mumbling something in his sleep.
What did Scamander do in his apartment? Hopefully, he was dressed under his own blanket, because if not, that meant- Graves carefully lifted the blanket off him and gaped. Oh, no.
Newt stirred and opened an eye to look at him. Graves stopped moving.
“Morning, Percival.“
P-Percival??? Since when???
“How is your back? Does it hurt?“
Bloody hell. He wasn’t drunk the previous day, was he?
“N-no.“ Graves stuttered. “Scamander, I mean, Newt.“ he started, clearing his throat. “Did we…?“ he said and gestured suggestively between them.
Newt’s reaction was immediate. His blush expanded up to the tips of his ears and down to his neck.
“O-of course n-not!“ Newt mumbled, looking away, hiding his eyes “Your back. You hurt your back and I gave you a massage.“
Graves’ eyebrow shot up at that “But how the hell I ended up naked then?“
“Well,“ Newt chewed on his bottom lip “it didn’t limit only to your back?“
“I just hope you didn’t massage my…“ Graves hid his face in an open palm and sighed heavily.
“No, but that can be fixed!“ Completely misunderstanding his words, Newt reached to tug at Graves’ blanket. Holy fuck.
Graves looked up, catching the blanket and threw his pillow at him.
“Get the fuck out, Scamander!“
#gramander#otp: we were inevitable#newt scamander#percival graves#fbawtft#fantastic beasts and where to find them#drabble#firebyfire#have crack fluff and salty Graves BYE
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13 Reasons Why
“It’s the first depiction of teen suicide that has felt real enough to knock the wind out of me. I don’t think I could watch it again. But it also feels, in some ways, like a how-to guide to suicide. Yes, teens should be aware of the impact that words and seemingly banal actions have on others. Petty grudges can lead to serious consequences. But is showing the minute details of someone’s suffering truly the best path to awareness? At what point does this become emotional torture porn — or even dangerous?” (Refinery 29)
I read this quote before and just thought I had to post it. 13 reasons why should not have been made the way it did. Whilst watching I almost went as far as getting out my notebook and making notes about what should’ve been changed and how they should’ve handled the topic of suicide in general (but I also do this with literally everything I watch because I over analyse all films and tv shows, you can tell I studied media studies and want to be a director in the future aha). It made not one mention to mental illness that Hannah could’ve been suffering from and because it included such graphic images of her suicide could’ve almost romanticised it? But the one thing that REALLY got to me is the fact that this show placed the ‘blame’ on the people in her life, saying its their fault for what happened to her. YES they were shitty shitty people but, for those watching the show who have had people they know commit suicide or attempt to, this show just emphasises this idea of blame, brings back all those questions and blames those who could’ve helped. I understand it is trying to highlight the issue of suicide in general, but it doesn't go about it in a sensitive way for anyone who has in real life suffered from suicidal thoughts or known those who have. DO NOT GET ME WRONG I am NOT JUSTIFYING RAPE OR BULLYING I am purely saying that for those in the middle, people like Clay and her parents, who have been left SO effected by her death. In reality, could they have stopped it? This show is bringing up those question for people in real life. Imagine spending your days questioning everything you ever said to the person, if one sentence or one lack of attention could’ve added and caused them to want to do such a thing. It’s shitty to think like that constantly and this show does nothing to stop that. (lol a part from rapists they should think like that forever FUCK THEM)
Life isn’t black and white, there isn’t happy and sad people in the world, and though this show emphasises this to an extent, it doesn’t show that other people could also be suffering immensely and that they cannot control there actions and consider what they are saying, just like Hannah. Yes, the inclusion of Alex also committing suicide does try to show that you can never know or see what is going on with someone and the effect of someone committing suicide can have on those ‘left behind’, it doesn’t highlight anything deeper, that he could’ve been going through shit himself that made him not be able to consider his affect on others????
I understand the show is trying to highlight that what we do and how we treat people can have a huge effect, it doesn’t even try to highlight that mental illness can play a huge part, and for some, be the reason. This tv show doesn’t address that you someone could have the most perfect life in the world and yet still have those thoughts BECAUSE OF MENTAL ILLNESS. Thats what annoys me. This being said, the one good thing to come out of this show is the fact that suicide and suicide prevention is being talked about more, both online and offline. Whether you like it or not, this show has opened that door for the conversations to start and this could never be a bad thing. I did like the show, don’t get me wrong, I just had A LOT of faults that have been nagging at me aha. I haven’t looked into other peoples opinions on the show really so I am going to read to some articles and gather a general consensus and re write this post on my actual blog later.
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A Big O = Small Pain
People have always known that sex is a tremendous source of pleasure. We all use sex as a way to emotionally bond with partners, to entertain ourselves, to kill time, allay sadness, and to feel ecstatic. However, an orgasm has another benefit – it will alleviate pain. By having an orgasm you will feel less physical pain. The more intense the orgasm the greater relief that you will get. This pain relief could happen due to a few reasons such as the hormones released during sex and the regions of the brain that are activated. A simple orgasm is a potent, easy, and free therapeutic tool that everyone on the planet has access to. Relief is in the palm of your hand.
Over the generations sitcoms have popularized having a headache as a way to get out of sex. However, there's a lot of evidence suggesting that an orgasm would relieve the pain of a headache. A study was published in Cephalalgia: An International Journal of Headache that investigated how effective orgasms were at alleviating this pain. This study was done with anonymous questionnaires in 2013. The subjects were from two groups, migraines and cluster headaches. There were 306 people in the migraine group and 96 people in the cluster headache group, 402 in total. The sex ratio in the two groups was inverted, but other than that there were no significant differences. These two groups of patients tend to behave differently, migraine patients retreat for rest and cluster headache patients get restless. However, orgasms seem to treat both maladies(1).
For those suffering from cluster headaches or migraines an orgasm will most likely give you some relief. According to this study, published in Cephalalgia, the orgasm is the important part of the equation. The type of intercourse which produces the orgasm is completely irrelevant. It could be any sexual position or masturbation. You will still get the pain relief, this relief isn't uniform though. Of the subjects in this study the majority of them reported getting pain relief from cumming. Out of those that reported relief 43% reported feeling relief shortly after climax. 17.7% of those subjects reported feeling relief at the precise moment of orgasm. 20.3% felt relief at the beginning of their sexual experience. While another 20.3% got the relief 30 minutes after their orgasms; the cluster headache group had similar results. Cumming is an effective enough method of pain relief that 36.4% of the men in the migraine group regularly use it therapeutically, while 13.7% of the women did the same thing. In the cluster headache group 30% of the men orgasm for relief, but none of the women in that group did(1). The potency of orgasmic-pain-relief is not relegated to just headaches, but all pain.
Thanks to cheesy sitcoms, headaches and sex have been permanently linked. Even though an orgasm will soothe a cornucopia of maladies. Such as muscle cramps, including PMS cramps. For many years it has been known that frequent orgasms will soothe your cramps during menstruation. This is most likely due to the hormones that are released during your orgasm. Combined with an increase in blood flow and the muscle contractions that take place during your orgasm. It's also important to note that the more intense your orgasm is the more pain relief you will feel(2). This amazing medicine, created within your body, is the result of many factors. These factors include brain activity and hormones.
Plenty of the hormones that are released during an orgasm benefit us. Whether it's seratonin, dopamine, or oxytocin. We benefit from all of these hormones in one way or another. Oxytocin, in particular, has an incredible analgesic effect. Oxytocin has been used as a salve for chronic pain among patients suffering from fibromyalgia, PTSD, and even something as banal as a headache. It is thought that oxytocin relieves pain because it fits into the same brain receptors that are active during pain. Oxytocin also plugs into opiate receptors in your brain, which may play a part in this pain relief. One of the more renowned researchers that have looked into this is Beverly Whipple, a professor at Rutgers University. Professor Whipple has found that during masturbation women's pain threshold increases by 74.6% and their pain tolerance increases by 106.7%(3). By combining these findings with the way your brain is engaged during an orgasm it becomes clear how an orgasm dampens pain.
Brain activity combines with the hormone activity of an orgasm to provide you with a very pleasant feeling of pain relief. An experiment was conducted at Rutgers University by Barry Komisaruk to discover more about this brain activity. Barry Komisaruk found nine women that wanted to get connected to an fMRI while masturbating. He found that during the female orgasm 30 areas of the brain get activated, including regions that activate during pain. Komisaruk found that two of the areas that activate are the cingulate cortex and the insula. Both of these areas activate during pain and intense pleasure, this most likely has something to do with the pain relief of orgasms(4). This knowledge will allow you to make your life more comfortable and less painful, you'll also have so much fun doing it.
The knowledge that orgasms can alleviate your pain is incredibly valuable to anyone and everyone. When you begin to implement this nugget of wisdom in your life you will become more comfortable, feel more pleasant and life will be easier. Also, you will have a lot of fun putting this factoid into practice. Who doesn't love to cum? It also pays to keep in mind that the more intense the orgasm you have the more pain relief you will feel(2). This is where we can begin to view sex toys as therapeutic devices. The entire purpose of sex toys is to bring you to orgasm faster, with more ease, and to intensify that orgasm. When you combine that fact with the fact that orgasms provide relief from pain you will come to one crucial conclusion. Sex toys will provide you with pain relief faster, with more ease, and intensify that pain relief. The choice of which toy to use will entirely depend on what works for your body. If you get better orgasms from vaginal stimulation then perhaps the Ripple Rabbit or the Sultry would soothe your wounds better. If you prefer clitoral stimulation then you should look at trying the Sweetie Rabbit or the Wanachi Mini-Multi to ease your aches. If you're a man then the Vivid Pussy Fuck or the Palm Pal: Ass should be just what the doctor ordered. Perhaps anal stimulation gives you a better orgasm. If you are in pain an orgasm a day would, very likely, make life easier and more pleasant. Why not give it a try?
Hambach, Anke, Evers, Stefan, Summ, Oliver, Husstedt, Ingo W., and Anchim Frese, “The Impact of Sexual Activity on Idiopathic Headaches: An Observational Study,” Cephalalgia: An International Journal of Headache 33 (2013): 384-389, accessed January 3, 2017, DOI: 10.1177/0333102413476374
“6 Healthy Reasons to Masturbate,” Reader's Digest: Best Health, accessed on January 3, 2017, http://www.besthealthmag.ca/best-you/girlfriends-guide/6-healthy-reasons-to-masturbate/
“Oxytocin for Pain Suppression” Oxytocin Accelerator, accessed on January 3, 2017, http://oxytocinaccelerator.com/oxytocin-for-pain-suppression/
“Pain Brain Regions Also Active During Female Orgasm,” Short Sharp Science: New Scientist, accessed during January 3, 2017, https://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/11/pain-brain-regions-also-active.html
#All natural pain relief for sciatica#Holistic pain relief for lower back pain#all natural pain relief for back pain#All natural relief for arthritis#Holistic pain relief from knee pain#Review of pain relief for neck pain#All natural holistic approach for easy pain relief
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